Category Archives: Article

From the sit-ins on the Kasbah Square in Tunis to the tents on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, from the encampments on the Puerta del Sol in Madrid to Syntagma Square in Athens, from the Wisconsin Uprising to Occupy LA, from Tahrir Square in Cairo to Liberty Plaza in New York – there is an incredible movement of occupations growing in this year of 2011. Slogans like “They don’t represent us” call for a non-representationist political practice, inventive forms of assembling bring new meaning to the good old general assembly, reappropriations of space and time thwart the logic of private and public: There is a new abstract machine in the making, traversing the local practices, empowering itself with every new space that is occupied, every new assembly that finds another form of expression and sociality. This issue of transversal is a discursive component of this abstract machine emerging from the actual experiences of Occupy Wall Street, dedicated to all the precarious occupiers in the world.

Contents
Judith Butler: Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street
Nicole Demby: Liberty Plaza. A “Message” Entangled with its Form
Isabell Lorey: Non-representationist, Presentist Democracy
Gerald Raunig: The Molecular Strike
Nato Thompson: The Occupation of Wall Street Across Time and Space
Dan S. Wang: From One Moment to the Next, Wisconsin to Wall Street

As the fire continues to cling on the roofs of a fallen empire, the charred black smoke lingers. Desperate bodies wander to find scraps to savour and remnants to rescue. Their aged bones are physically unable to rebuild the mythical glory they once relished 40 years ago. The Kingdom has crumbled. It has been ten years since the impending hit – 9/11- the event that created the first crack in the monumental symbol of wealth, power and security, and where we see for the first time, fear and doubt seeping into the human imagination. It was an American dream, a fallen dream, that was once everyone’s dream that we are seeing beginning to shatter. But what is left?

In the dust and ashes of the decade to follow we see sudden shifts in values and visions. We see the election of the first president of colour, a sudden awareness of global warming, a scaling back of industries, the rise of the global south, and in 2008, a major global economic meltdown. A decade following the first meteorite in the shape of an aeroplane to penetrate psyche of a masses, brings to question: what can we now fathom of the world? Can we accept that dust is dust and now we must build anew?

The fires of the forest continue to burn as nature claims its rightful power over humanity; the remaining debris of many human civilizations that came before lie buried in the Earth. Nature prevails over man once again.

Bond-fires

What we see beginning to emerge from the ashes is a new consciousness and awareness of each other in the World and in nature. We see a new generation burning with energy. A generation left to undo, remake and re-imagine a new world that was destroyed by misled visions progress of previous generations. We see an ecological turning and a movement towards traditional forms of pedagogy, craftsmanship and knowledge sharing that was lost in industrialization. But what now that continues to burn are the fires that bring us together.

Around the fire we gather, to keep warm, to provide mutual support for survival. We talk, we share stories, we dream of the past. A new system is emerging one that connects us by Ethernet that creates a model of the human mind and where we search for a collective vision. But there are forces trying to control it. A gripping past of former demons that haunts us.

We believe, we worship the spirit that brings us together, and celebrate the fires that burn within us.

Fires of Desire

Fire is heat and burning. Fires spread. It lies dormant in hotspots within the Earth, waiting to re-emerge again – connected by a network of embers. When a flame is killed, it can still grow strong again in another time and in another place. Fire moves silently – warming, cooling, sparking and burning. It is a fire of desire that lies within all our hearts. It is a desire that moves between us and that links us. There are no words for this desire that grows and burns. It is a desire that emerges and burns when fuelled and brought together collectively.

In a seeming apocalyptic time of immense change in a collapsed economy for culture as conservative governments around the world demolish the welfare state as uprisings emerge across Europe by disenchanted youth mobilized by social media resisting against high rates of unemployment and an astronomical rise in tuition fees, how do we maintain hope? How do we find space for the desire beyond economic concerns and to find new sustainable models of subsistence? Within a globalized community around the world, there is still a desire to create, and that fire will never die despite any economy or government support. How can we now begin to rebuild from the ashes a new world, a new vision of culture? How will it manifest in flames? How can we begin to spark imagination of new possibilities and utopias to question the structures that have crumbled?

Flames spread. They grow and flare up.

We are a collective of individuals from a generation lost of opportunities, lost in a time of great uncertainty, altering weather patterns, economic structural upheaval, social re-organization through digital innovations and change. Fires of desire is a sparking and ignition of an exploration of new platforms and ideas of collective working to find and create our own visions and possibilities in a world of dwindling finances and hopes for the future.

DOXA
2011

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Founded in 2010, DOXA is an international research collective based in London, UK. Through an on-going project called ‘Creative Space’, DOXA facilitates cross-disciplinary dialogue through open discussion events to approach new visions of culture today in light of the economic crisis, globalization and the digital turn. Through the events, DOXA brings together artists, academics, policy makers and industry professionals to explore new ways of developing and sustaining culture and creativity, while address current developments in policy, society and the economy. Doxa (δόξα) is a common belief, as opposed to knowledge; doxa is associated with community, dialogue and truth.

AQ’s 4th Recession Impacts Survey: now live
11th August – 19th September 2011

Following the publication of its three reports on the impacts of the recession on the cultural sector in 2009 and 2010, Arts Quarter is repeating its online survey a year on from conducting its third such survey in order to continue to plot the ongoing affects of the current economic climate on the arts.

Some 500 organisations took part in our last such survey and we hope that many more will do so this time in order to send a clear message to key decision makers about the current state of the sector, the implications of two waves of cuts in subsidy, falls in Local Authority support and the ongoing affects of the slow progression out of the economic downturn of the last three years.

Above all, this Survey seeks to provide an opportunity for arts organisations throughout the UK to benchmark their fundraising and wider income generation performance against their peers within their artforms and regions.

This year’s survey will also seek to gather reactions to the range of initiatives announced by DCMS, ACE and HLF to boost philanthropy, following on from AQ’s Philanthropy in the Arts Consultation conducted and published in March.

The findings of this Survey will be published free of charge in October 2011.

Arts organisations may take part in this research project by clicking here

David McNally, ‘From financial crisis to world slump: accumulation, financialization, and the global slowdown’, Marx and the Financial Crisis of 2008, December 2008

As the International Monetary Fund observed some months ago, we are living through “the largest financial crisis in the United States since the Great Depression.” But that was to understate things in two ways. First, the financial crisis is no longer largely about the US. It has gone global, rocking the UK, the Eurozone, Japan, and the so-called “emerging market economies.” A wave of devastating national and regional crises is just getting started, having already hit Iceland, Hungary, the Ukraine, and Pakistan. Secondly, this is no longer simply a financial crisis; a global economic slump is now sweeping through the so-called “real economy,” hammering the construction, auto and consumer goods sectors, and clobbering growth rates in China and India. Manufacturing output is sharply down in the US, Europe, Japan and China. The Detroit Three automakers, reeling from losses of $28.6 billion in the first half of this year, are teetering on the verge of collapse. World trade is in a stunning free fall.

Bankrupt Britain: An atlas of social change
by Daniel Dorling
23 May 2011

Bankrupt Britain is a unique atlas giving a comprehensive picture of the effect of the recession on Britain. In detailed colour maps, it shows how economic, social and environmental fortunes have been affected in different areas in the wake of the 2007 banking crisis, 2008 economic crash and 2009 credit crunch. It is essential reading for a broad audience with detailed local level data and a national snap-shot of Britain during this time.

Daniel Dorling is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Sheffield. His recent books include Injustice: Why social inequality persists and So you think you know about Britain?. He is a member of the World Health Organization’s Scientific Resource Group on Health Equity Analysis and Research.Bethan Thomas is a Research Fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of Sheffield. She has researched extensively on inequalities in Britain. Her publications include Identity in Britain and The Grim Reaper’s Road Map.

Fillip 13 introduces Intangible Economies, a new, ongoing series broadening the notion of economy beyond its financial dimensions. The series focuses on the multifarious forms of exchange fuelled by affect and desire, speculatively investigating the fundamental role these affective transactions play in modes of representation and, accordingly, in cultural production.

This issue includes series texts by Candice Hopkins, Jan Verwoert, and series editor Antonia Hirsch. Forthcoming installments will include contributions by Hadley+Maxwell, Olaf Nicolai, and Monika Szewczyk, among others.

Also in Fillip 13:
Carson Chan: Measures of an Exhibition
Anthony Downey: Camps (or the Precarious Logic of Late Modernity)
Lisa Marshall: An Evidence Horizon
Haema Sivanesan: Producing Images in Times of War
Ryan Trecartin in conversation with Kristina Lee Podesva
Claire Tancons and Jesse McKee: On Carnival and Contractual Curating

The issue also features a record of The AAAARG Library, a site-specific installation commissioned for Fillip 13 and the 2010 NY Art Book Fair. The Library, produced by artist Sean Dockray and curated by Jeff Khonsary, will be presented again this summer as part of Night Market, a Red76 project for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, MA.

In 2008, the ‘credit crunch’ progressed from financial crisis to global economic recession, its impact spreading from the US housing market to western financial markets and, by the end of the year, to most nations and sectors of the international economy. Its origins in the highly technical character of the ‘toxic’ products spawned in the financial world of intermediation and risk management have informed a hesitant and, in turn, managerial analysis of causality. This hesitancy was reflected in the statements expressed by politicians and business leaders throughout much of 2008 as they oscillated between inaction and reaction and expressed fears, in turn, about the crisis realising uncontrollable inflationary or deflationary trends.
For much of 2008, American and British politicians and business leaders were anxious to downplay the problems created by the credit crisis until the financial world reached the brink of collapse. The UK government, spent much of the year in denial about the weakness of the British economy – it was sound in its essentials, blaming US and wider international developments for the position the UK economy is in 1; while the US government dithered over a bailout plan which was initially designed to buy up all the worthless, toxic assets of the finance sector but eventually took the form of buying shares in US banks.
The combination of denial, hesitancy and indecision that has characterised responses to the current economic crisis has its origins in the political and business world’s interpretation of the recent performance of the western, mainly Anglo-American, model of capitalism. Those who have sought to manage it have created a rhetoric laced with words such as stability, expansion, and globalisation when, in reality, the leading Western nation, the USA, and its satellite, the UK, have sought to manage economies whose productive dynamism has disappeared and who rely increasingly upon servicing the productive activities that take place elsewhere in the world. A thin veil of respectability has been lent to this perception by the theorisation of knowledge as the intangible, magical ingredient of a new type of Western economy that lives by its wits rather than by what it makes 2.
The hollow character of these ideas and policies is now perhaps exposed, creating an opportunity for a more considered and reflective view of what is really happening in the West and the wider world. This essay discusses the causes of the current economic crisis and examines the social conditions of its emergence, as well as exploring the limitations of the actions currently being taken to tackle it; the limits, in other words, of what some commentators refer to as a Keynesian programme of state intervention 3.